Re: "LisaBBS" / Who knows Lisa font formats?

On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 10:29:21 PM UTC-4, Tom Stepleton wrote:
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> A lot of LisaBBS is Lisa-specific. The 68K assembly code is not going to
> work on ARM, of course, and all the code that talks to the filesystem or
> works with the serial port targets Lisa OS specifically. Additionally, some
> of the data that LisaBBS packages in archives that it sends (e.g. the 128k
> of "label" data, plus some of the filesystem metadata) has no counterpart
> on a Linux box.
>
> There may be an additional problem for would-be porters. Lisa Pascal
> supports arguments to functions and procedures that are also functions and
> procedures. I don't know if Free Pascal does this---I'm not sure, but I get
> the impression that this capability isn't found in most Pascal compilers.
> (Disclaimer: I've only ever written Pascal code for the Lisa---and the
> computer science AP test back in the 1990s :-)
>
> The implementation of quicksort uses function and procedure arguments
> pretty extensively, see
>
> https://github.com/stepleton/lisabbs/blob/master/LIBSORT.TEXT#L22
>
> They turn up elsewhere, too.
>
> Fortunately, there's little point to porting LisaBBS to a modern computer
> running any sort of Linux. You would be much better off writing a very thin
> Pascal shell (or Python would be even easier) that mimics the simplistic
> LisaBBS interface and invokes lrzsz
> <https://ohse.de/uwe/software/lrzsz.html> to send files to the remote
> system.
>
> All rather good to know.

Free Pascal has a tendency to be able to do things that leave you feeling rather dirty (like for example setting compiler flags on the fly and forcing it to look the other way when you abuse the type checking). I don't know for a fact that you can pass functions as arguments, but since it supports multiple dialects of Pascal (including Apple Pascal), I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if you can. But yeah, the 68K assembly code is a definite dealbreaker; it'd probably be a major hassle to find anyone who even really understands it anymore.

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